Halsey Minor, the founder of tech news site Cnet whose roller-coaster career mirrored the dot-com boom and bust, is placing his bets on one of tech's most volatile ideas: bitcoin.

Minor stepped back into the limelight Thursday, announcing himself as founder and executive chairman of Bitreserve.org. The site allows users to import digital currency and have its value expressed in more traditional currencies including dollars, pounds, euros, yuan or yen.

"Bitreserve is built on top of the bitcoin network, allowing members to convert bitcoin into money they know, trust and understand," Minor said Thursday.

Bitreserve.org is in beta testing by invitation.

The company plans to earn revenue from conversions of bitcoin to bitcurrency - for example, when users convert bitcoin to biteuros - or when they transfer from one currency to another.

If anyone knows about the value-destroying volatility of the market, it's Minor. He's lived it.

Minor filed for personal bankruptcy in 2013. It was a long fall for the man ranked by Fortune magazine as the 34th-richest person under 40 in 2001. His value then: $180 million.

He made $200 million when CBS bought Cnet for $1.8 billion in 2008, but that didn't last. By 2010, he was selling $21 million worth of his personal art collection.

He owed $100 million to creditors in 2013, and had only $50 million to pay them, thanks to a series of bad real estate moves and investments.

Bitreserve comes onto the market following the high-profile collapse of Mt. Gox, a crypto-currency exchange that lost hundreds of millions of dollars worth of customers' bitcoins. It blamed hackers for the breach.